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Gabriel Zucman was born in Paris, France in 1986. From 2005 to 2010, he attended the École normale supérieure de Cachan, one of France's prestigious Grandes Écoles.[7] Hereafter, he first earned his M.Sc. in economic policy analysis in 2008 and a PhD in economics in 2013, both from the Paris School of Economics, for which he received the French Economic Association's award for best PhD dissertation in 2014. After finishing his studies, Zucman worked for a year as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley) before accepting a position as assistant professor of economics at the London School of Economics (LSE) and the same position at UC Berkeley, being currently on leave from LSE. Moreover, Zucman has worked as Co-Director of the World Wealth and Income Database (WID), a database aiming at the provision of access to extensive data series on the world distribution of income and wealth, since 2015.[8]

In August 2014 in Capital is Back, Zucman and French economist Thomas Piketty investigate the evolution of aggregate wealth-to-income ratios in the top eight developed economies, reaching back as far as 1700 in the case of the U.S., U.K., Germany, and France, and find that wealth-income ratios have risen from about 200-300% in 1970 to 400-600% in 2010, levels unknown since the 18th and 19th centuries. Most of the change can be explained by the long-run recovery of asset prices, the slowdown of productivity, and population growth.[10] Zucman has co-written several papers with Thomas Piketty.

Much of Zucman's research is on issues of economic inequality and, most importantly, tax havens. In 2015 in his book,The Hidden Wealth of Nations, Zucman uses the systematic anomalies in international investment positions to show that the net foreign asset positions of rich countries are generally underestimated because they don't capture most of the assets held by households in offshore tax havens. Based on his calculations, he finds about 8% of the global financial wealth of households, or $7.6 trillion, to be held in tax havens, three-quarters of which go undeclared.[11]

In 2017-18, Zucman has been focused on the scale of multinational tax avoidance by base erosion and profit shifting ("BEPS") tools in the largest corporate tax havens. Zucman believes Ireland, recognised as a major corporate tax haven, is still materially underestimated by Orbis-database studies due to technical factors (even though these studies rank Ireland as the 5th largest global corporate Conduit OFC).[12] Research published by Zucman, Tørsløv and Wier in June 2018, showed that Ireland is the largest corporate tax haven in the world, even larger than the entire Caribbean corporate tax haven system.[4][5][6] This research also showed that tax disputes between high-tax jurisdictions and corporate tax havens are extremely rare, and that tax disputes really only occur between high-tax jurisdictions.[13]

Much of Zucman's other research deals with the effect of the G20's crackdown on tax havens and corporate tax havens, cross-border taxation and multinational profit shifting, the long-term relationship between wealth and inheritance, and the trajectory of wealth inequality in the United States. Zucman is frequently quoted in the leading global news media.[14][5][15]